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In our forthcoming book, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, we identify several dozen Americans never before suspected of working for Soviet intelligence. These identifications are based on KGB archival records of its operations in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s.

These records included some files on atomic espionage that also covered KGB work in Great Britain in World War II--due to the close links between the British and American atomic projects. To our surprise, we learned that from 1942 until early 1944 the chief source of Moscow's intelligence on the Manhattan Project were two KGB recruits in Britain with access to Manhattan Project technical reports. One of these British sources, Melita Norwood, was exposed in 1999 thanks to the KGB material Vasili Mitrokhin gave to MI5 in the 1990s. The other is revealed for the first time in Spies: Engelbert Broda, a refugee Austrian physicist and secret communist, who worked at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge.

Another KGB spy in Britain identified in the documents we examined had no discernible American connections, so he is not discussed in our book--but he is well worth some attention, for his identification clears up a mystery in espionage history.

More by Alexander Vassiliev

In their 1998 book, The Crown Jewels: The British Secrets at the Heart of the KGB Archives, historian Nigel West and former KGB officer Oleg Tsarev cited an October 1936 report from the KGB's illegal station in London announcing to Moscow that through Edith Tudor Hart, the Austrian-born KGB asset who had recruited Kim Philby, the station had recruited a "second SOHNCHEN [Philby's cover name] who, in all probability, offers even greater possibilities than the first." By 1937, this source had been given the code name "Scott" and credited with providing "about 25 leads." Theodore Mally, "Scott's" KGB controller, noted, "most of these are raw material, but there are 4-5 among them who have already been studied and on whom we have already started working."

Moscow worried that too many of the leads had connections to the British communist party and urged that "Scott" be more selective. In April, Mally submitted a report prepared by Scott discussing the party members at Oxford and their professions. In July, "Scott" wrote another report on the student communist populations at Oxford, Cambridge, and the University of London. It optimistically noted,

if we work cautiously in the universities, the risk is not very great. We can be practically sure of always being able to select reliable people.

A number of his potential recruits were signed on before the station was closed down due to the Soviet purges, and, once contact with "Scott" was reestablished in 1941, he helped recruit new sources. West and Tsarev's book had, however, been written with the cooperation of the Russian SVR-- successor to the KGB--and under the rules of their agreement the identification of "Scott" was withheld.

But the intriguing material about "Scott" and his possible connection to an "Oxford ring" that paralleled the well-documented and highly successful "Cambridge ring" of Soviet spies (Philby, Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean) fueled speculation among British espionage historians and journalists about "Scott's" identity. Candidates have ranged from Sir David Scott Fox, a diplomat and former fellow of Queen's College, Oxford, to Sir Peter Wilson, a chairman of Sotheby's, who went from Oxford into the British intelligence services in 1933.

Peter Wright, the MI5 officer whose 1988 exposé Spycatcher drew British government lawsuits, named Bernard Floud, a Labour MP who committed suicide while under consideration for a ministerial appointment; his brother Peter, former director of the Victoria and Albert Museum; Sir Andrew Cohen, a senior diplomat; and Jennifer Williams Hart as connected to the rumored Oxford ring. Wright, however, wrote that his investigation, carried out in the 1960s, had gone nowhere. Several of the suspects were already dead or died during the investigation; several others committed suicide. Jennifer Hart (no relation to Edith Tudor Hart) admitted being a student communist in the 1930s but put a benign twist on her recruitment, suggesting that after joining the Home Office around 1938 she met with a clandestine Russian contact named "Otto" who told her to keep her party membership secret and lie low. Uncomfortable with the deception, she quit the party, never having turned over any secret information. Hart poo-poohed the idea that there had been an Oxford ring, telling one journalist: "As far as I'm aware there wasn't anything like Cambridge. There were communists of course, and Soviets were trying to recruit them, but as far as I'm aware they were not successful."